An
Unfinished Cinema
Text
written for the Centenary of Cinema, Paris, 1995
By
Abbas Kiarostami
Originally,
I thought that the lights went out in a movie theatre so
that
we could see the images on the screen better.
Then I looked a
little
closer at the audience settling comfortably into the seats and
saw
that there was a much more important reason: the darkness allowed
the
members of the audience to isolate themselves from others and be
alone.
They were both with others and distant from them.
When
we reveal a film’s world to members of an audience, they each
learn
to create their own world through the wealth of their own
experience.
As
a filmmaker, I rely on this creative intervention for, otherwise,
the
film and the audience will die together.
Faultless stories that
work
perfectly have one major defect: they work too well to allow the
audience
to intervene.
It
is a fact that films without a story are not
very popular with
audiences,
yet a story also requires gaps, empty spaces like in a
crossword
puzzle, voids that it is up to the audience to fill in.
Or,
like a private detective in a thriller to discover.
I
believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and
time
to its audience. A
half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema
that
attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience,
so
resulting in hundreds of films.
It belongs to the members of that
audience
and corresponds to their world.
The
world of each work, of each film recounts a new truth.
In the
darkened
theatre, we give everyone the chance to dream and to express
his
dream freely. If art
succeeds in changing things and proposing
new
ideas, it can only do so via the creativity of the people we are
addressing—each
individual member of the audience.
Between
the fabricated and ideal world of the artist and that of the
person
he addresses, there is a solid and permanent bond.
Art allows
the
individual to create his truth according to his own wishes and
criteria;
it also allows him to reject other imposed truths.
Art
gives
each artist and his audience the opportunity to have a more
precise
view of the truth concealed behind the pain and passion that
ordinary
people experience every day. A
filmmaker’s commitment to
attempting
to change daily life can only reach fruition through the
complicity
of the audience. The
latter is active only if the film
creates
a world full of contradictions and conflicts that the
audience
members are able to perceive.
The
formula is simple: there is a world that we consider real but not
completely
just. This world is
not the fruit of our minds and it
does
not suit us all that well but, through cinematic techniques, we
create
a world that is one hundred times more real and just than the
world
around us. This does
not mean that our world gives a false
image
of justice but, on the contrary, it better highlights the
contrasts
that exist between our ideal world and the real world.
In
this
world, we speak of hope, sorrow and passion.
The
cinema is a window into our dreams and through which it is easier
to
recognize ourselves. Thanks
to the knowledge and passion thus
acquired,
we transform life to the benefit of our dreams.
The
cinema seat is of greater assistance than the analyst’s couch.
Sitting
in a cinema seat we are left to our own devices and this is
perhaps
the only place where we are so bound to and yet so distant
from
each other: that is the miracle of cinema.
In
cinema’s next century, respect of the audience as an intelligent
and
constructive element is inevitable.
To attain this, one must
perhaps
move away from the concept of the audience as the absolute
master.
The director must also be the audience of his own film.
For
one hundred years, cinema has belonged to the filmmaker.
Let us
hope
that now the time has come for us to implicate the audience in
its
second century.